1 Intro

  • R Markdown is a file format for making dynamic documents with R.
  • An R Markdown document is written in markdown (an easy-to-write plain text format) and contains chunks of embedded R code. In general, there are three parts (look at the cheat sheet below):
    • Header
    • Text
    • Codue chunks
  • The cool thing about RMarkdown is that it offers a plain and easy to understand way to link code and documentation.
  • Furthermore, it is also very straight forward to produce html, pdf or docx outputs from RMarkdow. For example, this website is mainly based on Markdown.

2 Setup

The cheat sheet offers a pretty good introduction:

3 RNotebook

Actually, I would highly recommend you to use instead of R Markdown the more convenient R Notebook. It has all the functionality of R Markdown plus

  • code chunks can be rendered independently and step by step
  • You do not knit but preview documents - this makes sharing work easier

Basically, it works in the exact same way as R Markdown (see example below).

4 Example

You can download an example R Notebook here